News

2017

Nov 24

The work of transcribing Vardill's contributions to the European Magazine is complete and the files have found a new home at vardill.org. The files on this Waseda site having been crawled by both Google and Bing will be preserved for the convenience of search engine users. All future additions, corrections, etc. will, however, be made to the vardill.org files.

Sep 28

In the absence of easily accessible online archives of Anna Jane Vardill's literary works, I have undertaken the task of transcribing and editing poetry and prose published in The European Magazine, working from digital scans of copies preserved by the HathiTrust. I have started with items published in 1816 and will work forwards and backwards from that year, as the spirit moves me.

Jul 20

Two memoirs have been added to the Library, one unpublished and one long out of print. Konstanty Buda's unpublished account of his role in organising the last transport of Polish soldiers and civilians from the U.S.S.R. to Iran provides an insight into Gen. Berling's decision to desert the Polish Army and remain in the Soviet Union. Edward Dzierżek's full-length account of his experiences as an internee coincides with Buda's memoir.

Mar 31

I have retired and the 'Courses' page has been removed. Waseda University will continue to host this faculty site, but the buda.cache.waseda.ac.jp sub-domain and its associated servers have been shut down. Educational materials from the sub-domain have been archived and will be migrated to this site, beginning with Email Guidelines

2016

Jul 10

The archive of Donald Philippi's Technical Japanese Translation newsletter is being converted to a responsive one-column layout that will make it easier to read on tablets and cellphones. Each article is being proofed and any remaining mistakes corrected.

2015

Oct 02

A copy of the entry on Japan in Advertising Education around the World, co-authored with Prof Kazue Shimamura, has been added to the Publications section.

2014

Apr 01

The Waseda University Course N@vi CMS is the worst such system it has been my misfortune to encounter. With ever more faculty and students making use of this execrable system, it no longer makes sense hosting a separate CMS on my office servers. Consequently I have removed the Moodle CMS that has, with one or two exceptions, proved stable and easy to use. The removal of this CMS has also removed the necessity of maintaining an IP-reachable server. However, the buda.cache.waseda.ac.jp domain will be preserved for the immediate future, as a test-bed for experiments with on-demand materials.

Jan 03

In a further experiment, I've published an unfinished work of fiction (Psychic Dawn) to the Leanpub site. The Leanpub philosophy is to encourage writers to publish early and often, amending unfinished books in response to feedback from early readers. Pricing is flexible. Readers can download a free sample of the first chapter, or the entire book, for anything from the minimum price of $0.99, to the requested price of $4.99, to the physical maximum of $500.00.

2013

Nov 20

As part of my ongoing study of epublishing, I've uploaded two books (Psychic Awakening and Personal Business Correspondence) to the Leanpub site. The latter is a partial reprint of a textbook that went out of print several years ago. The former is a novel written under a pseudonym.

Hardware and software update of the Cache domain is complete. Web services are being provided by two headless Mac Mini computers, one running Mac OS X Server. One book and one article have been added to the publication list and an article on UK Police Jargon to the library.

2009

Mar 09

School of Commerce faculty offices have moved from Building 9 to the newly reconstructed Building 11. The servers hosting the Moodle course support system and other educational facilities are now located in Building 11, and this move has necessitated allocation of new IP addresses. The domain names of the servers remain unchanged. The move provided an opportunity to make some signficant hardware and software updates to the domain servers, some of which are still incomplete. The system should be completely functional by the start of the new academic year in April.

In addition to the student forums on my office server, I've created an English Q&A forum. Please post any queries you might have about English or English usage, and I'll try to answer them as quickly as possible.

Sep 30

Basic chat/forum services are available on my office server and visitors are welcome to drop by and leave messages. Also, I've added a couple of relatively new search sites to the links page and removed one that was showing its age.

1999

Jun 15

Because of the cancellation of today's classes, students taking the Oral Expression course will be asked to submit a short additional assignment. Content and format of the assignment will be announced next week.

May 15

The Email Guidelines pages have been moved from demon.co.uk and are now available on this server. I've corrected a few mistakes, and will be adding two or three pages in the near future. Please check back from time to time.

Although the Links page still features links to a number of online English-language newspapers, they have been made redundant by the excellent Internet Public Library site, which maintains an exhaustive list of links to newspapers and magazines throughout the world. Highly recommended!

1998

Nov 02

The English I (Conversation) class on Monday, Nov 17 (Period 3) will be held in the No. 3 Computer Room in Building 12. Details of the change will be given during the regular Nov 10 lesson.

Oct 30

I'm considering setting up an inter-class, inter-university mailing list for all students who are taking (or have taken) one of my network communication courses. If you have any ideas about guidelines for the list, I'd appreciate hearing from you.

There will be no Effective Writing class on Thursday, May 1. However, the deadline for Assignment 1 remains unchanged, and students must send their email introductions before noon on that day. The period for Assignment 2 will be May 1 to May 8. Please do not send Assignment 2 until you have received (and read!) an email announcement giving details of the content and format.

Apr 22

Students taking my Effective Writing email class may be interested in some Email Guidelines I've posted. The guidelines include sample messages and a find-the-mistakes quiz.

1997

Nov 28

The usual Thursday assignment for the Effective Writing class will be given on Monday, December 2, and the deadline for submissions will be noon on the following Monday.

Several new links have been added to the Links page. The new Infoseek search engine looks very good indeed, and metasearch sites such as all4one and MetaCrawler promise to make Web searches even more quick and efficient.

Nov 14

Seminar presentations have been pushed back one week. The first presentation will be on Nov 21, and subsequent presentations at one-week intervals.